Being asked to prove that he does not exist makes no sense; you can't prove a negative. (The negative in this case being that he does not exist.) Plus the burden of proof lies with the person making the proposal, and since there is no proof of god, it is their job to prove it.

Now, it's true that it shouldn't. But we can never say with 100% certainty that it will always happen like that. Mutations could occur, chemicals could mix up, or anything like that, and the product of the DNA template could be a ball of flesh and sludge that could only be called a cow because it used that DNA template.

All I'm saying, is that modern science doesn't use 100% sure, because we can't be 100% sure. And that's where Descartes reasoning in the meditations falls apart.

The thing about DNA and the ball of flesh and sludge is that what you're talking about is a miscarriage. That is almost always the cause of miscarriages: the DNA of the offspring is so far off of what the norm is supposed to be that the host parent cannot care for it, resulting in a null creation.

I see the point you're making, I just see holes through it, just as you see holes through mine. We've progressed as far as we can, as I see it.

Correction, he proved the existence of a divine, omniscient, all powerful being. Not necessarily "God" in the Christian sense of the term. In further writings, he actually never uses gendered pronouns for talking about God (because he wrote almost everything in Latin).

Have fun reading something that I've been studying in class since September and am only halfway through:
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(This isn't close to the translation I'm reading, so you might take different things from this.)

The fact remains however that it is impossible to prove something like that. From what I've read of Descartes is that he rationalized that he exists, thus something must've made him, thus god must exist. Which is a logical fallacy.

I am going to read these Meditations right now, and when I'm done, I'll likely be able to point out every error in logic he used. That's just my prediction, I could be wrong.

Well, I personally believe that I came from somewhere. I didn't just poof into existence. I was created by the gametes and zygotes of my mother and father, just as in turn, they were created in the same way, all the way back to our unicellular ancestors.

I do believe, however, that God (Chrisocentric) made all of the decisions along the way about how we were made. All of the "random" changes in our DNA code. Speaking of the topic of randomness, it's a proven fact that ALL of the random number generators lost their randomness on 9/11 for about four hours.

Even if our human made random number generators fail, it doesn't mean randomness doesn't exist...

Mind you, when I say randomness, I mean the unimaginably large amount of interactions on a subatomic level between particles that happens every microsecond. Such that it may as well be random to our cognizance.

I also believe that if we had the correct equation, and were able to input all the data concerning everything that ever happened, we could predict with 100% accuracy what will happen, forever. Simply because everything we know is the product of innumerable physical interactions. Know all that come before, and we will know where all will go.

I came from the same genetic process. However, I believe that no God (Abrahamic), can exist. It simply doesn't make sense to me. What you attribute to god I attribute to Randomness. I believe that given billions of years, and the kind of dynamic universe we exist in, life and everything we know will simply fall into being through random chance.

Where some place god, I place time and entropy.
Given that particles move, it is almost inevitable that some will collide, and begin to form bigger particles, which will collide, and collide. And so on until we have atoms, and molecules, and then chemical reactions taking place where one molecule reorganizes others to be like it. And then many molecules clump together to form a cell, and so on. Until, billions upon billions of years later, a time more immense than any human can possible hope to conceive, life as we know it has come about through randomness.

That is not really what he's talking about. A brief summary of his thinking is that he wanted to prove that he could know things, so in the Meditations he decided to set aside all of his prior beliefs as false. This left him with things he knew were true, and things that were very likely true. He then realized he couldn't accept things that were very likely true as true, so he had to put those aside.

Then he had to come to terms that he couldn't come to terms with all of the things he knew as true because some of them relied on his senses, and he knew that the senses often deceive us, so he had to assume that we were dreaming. Some things were proven to be unbelievable if in a dream, so he had to throw out even more "truths". He then had to assume that what was believable in a dream was also wrong due to a higher being always deceiving him. This left him with almost no beliefs, except for one: he was thinking. By thinking he couldn't be deceived that he wasn't thinking.

So by that means that the assumption that the higher being wouldn't be malevolent, since the assumption was proven false. And then he goes on to talk about the nature of ideas. The ones that matter in this case are the ideas which come from outside of our consciousness, and the idea of gods comes from outside of all human consciousness. To prove that you just have to ask yourself where the idea of gods came from. From religious people? Well where did they get the idea from? The idea of gods dates back to time immemorial, so is taken to be an idea which is present in all sentient beings.

Well then... In all of that, I see... ********. From what I understand it's like the Matrix cop out. 'We could all be in a simulation'. That doesn't prove the existence of a god any more than it proves we're in the matrix. There's no proof either way.

I suppose it doesn't help that my opinion on Descartes has been, for years, that he's an idiot who put too much stock in the idea that our senses deceive us.

>>I suppose it doesn't help that my opinion on Descartes has been, for years, that he's an idiot who put too much stock in the idea that our senses deceive us.

Noooooooooooo. That's not what Descartes believed at all. He believed in his senses entirely. The purpose of the Meditations was to discuss the understanding of the world around us, rather than the goodness of what we should do as people (like most other philosophers until he did).

His very first thing that he talked about is the fact that he wanted to take a scientific approach to this (since he was a scientist mainly as well, you know the x,y grid that we use? Descartes made that), so he said that he had to be 100% sure of whatever he was going to believe in, just as in science you have to be sure of what you are saying to be able for it to be accepted in text books and by peers. Because he knew his senses often deceived him (think of a person who lost a limb, they will often feel phantom sensations from the lost limb).

I'd like to finish by saying that the best way to learn about this is to actually read it and think about Descartes' thought process in each step of his actions, rather than have someone explain it to you. (Also might be good to leave your prejudices at the door before reading it because if you think he's a *********** from the beginning, you very likely won't hear what he has to say.)

The thing is, that the '100% sure' idea is flawed. You cannot ever prove something is 100% true. There is ALWAYS somewhere you haven't looked. Modern science requires a 99.999% sure rate. I read the first bits of his Meditations and I don't really feel like continuing. I do value logical reasoning and scientific thought. However I find Descartes to, as I said before, be an idiot. I find his 'logic' flawed and his reasoning unsound.

The idea of a triangle of having 3 sides is 100% true. I have proven that we can prove things as 100% true, and as your counter argument is based on that, it appears to fall to pieces. I'm sure that from this point on we'll just be talking in circles...

First, I'd like to say that upon some googling, I have found that I confused Renes Descartes with Blaise Pascal.

Second, the Triangle is a human construct. Any supposed triangles occurring naturally will have billions of 'sides' when you look close enough. Simply because of the reality of how atoms and molecules bind together to make larger objects.

The flaw that I see in that is that regardless of it being a construct of anything, it will still have the same properties wherever you are (which is why many scientists who believe in extraterrestrial life say to upon first contact draw a triangle and write the Pythagorean equation since math is math and will be universal wherever). The idea of a triangle having more or less than three sides goes against its definition of existence. If you'd prefer an example from nature, we could examine a cow for example. We could say that all cows are animals which have the same DNA sequence template. Then by definition an animal which has the same DNA template will always be that cow, whereas other templates will create other animals.

Now, I'm no geneticist, so I'm going off of only what I've learned through my readings of the literature, but I am fairly certain that things of the same DNA template will never differ greatly. Simply due to the fact that DNA decides what is created and how stuff works.